DUESSELDORF, Germany, Nov 29 (AFP) - Former Serb militiaman Maxim Sokolovic was sentenced to nine years in prison by a court here Monday on charges of complicity in genocide for his role in atrocities committed in 1992.
Prosecutors had on Friday requested a life sentence for Sokolovic and sought his conviction on genocide, but the final verdict was for complicity, a court spokesman said.
Sokolovic, 59, was accused of having shot a Muslim prisoner in the back in his home town of Osmaci in northern Bosnia in the spring of 1992. He was also charged with brutally mistreating many others, using clubs and rubber truncheons.
A retired miner living in Germany since 1969, Sokolovic was a "willing executor" of the Serb policy of ethnic cleansing targeting Muslims, said prosecutor Ronald Georg. "His victims fell arbitrarily and to racial hatred," the prosecutor said.
Sokolovic had pleaded innocent. Married and the father of three children, he had worked as a miner in the western town of Kamp-Lintfort but took early retirement after being handicapped in two mining accidents.
Sokolovic was tried in Germany since he lives here. War crimes cases from the Yugoslav wars are normally tried in The Hague.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia tries war crimes suspects captured either in ex-Yugoslavia or while traveling abroad.
In a separate case in Germany, a Bosnian Serb arrested in Munich in 1998 for crimes against humanity and murder went on trial in September in Munich.
Djuradj Kusljic, 44, is accused of taking part in the "planned elimination" of Muslims in Bosnia Hercegovina in 1992 when he was police chief in the town of Vrbancji.
A former school headmaster, Kusljic denied having run the police department, saying that he only taught physics and mathematics.
He was arrested after turning up in Germany in 1993 claiming to be a war refugee. Bosnian authorities tracked him down last year and ordered his arrest, but did not demand his extradition.
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